A01=Andy Oler
agricultural advertisements
agricultural production
Author_Andy Oler
Bemis Transplanter
cabbage transplanter
capitalism
Category=DS
Category=JBSC
Chicago
Cooperative Planning and Development of Wauseon
countryside
Dawn Powell
Dust Bowl
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
factory work
farmers
flyover country
gender roles
Gennett Records
Great Depression
heartland
Indiana
industrial modernity
industrialization
Jack Greitzer
Kansas
labor
Langston Hughes
Lorine Niedecker
masculinity
middle ground
Midwest
midwestern literature
migration stories
modernism
Next Year or I fly my rounds
Not Without Laughter
Ohio
Oklahoma
pastoral nostalgia
pastoralism
Poor White
race records
regionalism
rural communities
rural life
Sherwood Anderson
small town
Tempestuous
tenant farming
The Green Corn Rebellion
The Home Place
The Story of a Country Boy
The Sunlit Road
Tiger Plant Seeder
urban industrialism
Wauseon
William Cunningham
Wright Morris
Product details
- ISBN 9780807170786
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 12 Jun 2019
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Midwest holds two conflicting positions in the American cultural imagination, both of which rob the region of its distinctiveness. Often, it is seen as the ""heartland,"" a pastoral ideal standing in for all of American culture. Alternatively, the Midwest can represent ""flyover country,"" part of an expansive, undifferentiated mass between the coasts. In Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature, Andy Oler challenges both views by pairing fiction and poetry from the region with cultural and material texts that illustrate the processes by which regional modernism both opposes and absorbs prevailing models of twentieth-century manhood.
Although it acknowledges a tradition of Midwestern urban literature, Old-Fashioned Modernism focuses on representations of life on farms and in small towns that generate specific forms of rural modernity. Oler considers a series of male protagonists who both fulfill and resist conventional American narratives of economic advancement, spatial experience, and gender roles. The writers he studies portray the onset of socioeconomic and mechanical modernity by merging realist and naturalist narratives with upwellings of modernist form and style. His analysis charts a trajectory in which Midwestern literature depicts experiences that appear dependent on nostalgic pastoralism but actually foreground the ongoing fragmentation and emerging anxieties of the countryside. In detailed readings of novels by Sherwood Anderson, William Cunningham, Langston Hughes, Wright Morris, and Dawn Powell, as well as the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Oler highlights images of men from the rural Midwest who face the tensions between agricultural production and mass industrialization. These works of literature, which Oler examines alongside pieces of material culture like advertisements for farm implements and record labels, feature communities that support self-made as well as corporate identities. As portraits of the Midwest that resist the totalizing trajectory of industrialization, these texts generate spaces that meld rural and urban economics, land use, and affective experiences.
Old-Fashioned Modernism reveals how Midwestern regionalism negotiates the anxieties and dominant narratives of early- and midcentury rural masculinities, as regional literature and culture alter the forms and spaces of literary modernism.
Although it acknowledges a tradition of Midwestern urban literature, Old-Fashioned Modernism focuses on representations of life on farms and in small towns that generate specific forms of rural modernity. Oler considers a series of male protagonists who both fulfill and resist conventional American narratives of economic advancement, spatial experience, and gender roles. The writers he studies portray the onset of socioeconomic and mechanical modernity by merging realist and naturalist narratives with upwellings of modernist form and style. His analysis charts a trajectory in which Midwestern literature depicts experiences that appear dependent on nostalgic pastoralism but actually foreground the ongoing fragmentation and emerging anxieties of the countryside. In detailed readings of novels by Sherwood Anderson, William Cunningham, Langston Hughes, Wright Morris, and Dawn Powell, as well as the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Oler highlights images of men from the rural Midwest who face the tensions between agricultural production and mass industrialization. These works of literature, which Oler examines alongside pieces of material culture like advertisements for farm implements and record labels, feature communities that support self-made as well as corporate identities. As portraits of the Midwest that resist the totalizing trajectory of industrialization, these texts generate spaces that meld rural and urban economics, land use, and affective experiences.
Old-Fashioned Modernism reveals how Midwestern regionalism negotiates the anxieties and dominant narratives of early- and midcentury rural masculinities, as regional literature and culture alter the forms and spaces of literary modernism.
Andy Oler, assistant professor of humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, grew up on a farm in the Midwest. He is the editor of Pieces of the Heartland: Representing Midwestern Places.
